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In late 1922, Lenin wrote a secret speech censuring General Secretary Stalin, to be read the following spring at the Twelfth Party Congress. But on March 9, 1923, Lenin suffered a debilitating stroke, and the speech was never given. Featuring Orlando Figes, of Cambridge University; Boris Starkov, of St. Petersburg Academy of Economics; and Yuri Amiantov, chief archivist of the Communist Party, this program focuses on the sequence of events surrounding...
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In 1915, the Ottoman Empire tried to exterminate its Christian Armenian citizens, killing perhaps as many as 1.5 million people. Modern-day Turkey denies that it happened. For both moral and diplomatic reasons, Israel downplays the event. This program investigates evidence of an Armenian genocide by visiting sites of mass burials and presenting testimonials from survivors and their descendants. Leading figures on both sides of the debate are interviewed,...
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On the night of October 24, 1917, a police patrol stopped two men on the streets of St. Petersburg, but failing to recognize their quarry, the police let them pass. One of them-disguised as a tramp-was the future founder and leader of the Soviet Union: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In this program, Cambridge University's Orlando Figes, author of A People's Tragedy, and Vitaly Startsev, of St. Petersburg Herzen University, investigate the circumstances of...
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Although the shocking murder of Sergei Kirov-the charismatic Party member whose popularity threatened the power base of his friend, Stalin-impacted the lives of millions, the truth behind it has long remained a mystery. Was it motivated by politics, or by something else? In this program, Boris Starkov, of St. Petersburg Academy of Economics, and Yuri Amiantov, chief archivist of the Communist Party, scrutinize the facts surrounding the momentous 1934...
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This program details the nature of the Swedish Empire in the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries and draws a fascinating portrait of Charles XII. But the major part of the program is devoted to a portrait of the extraordinary and contradictory Tsar Peter the Great, the Oriental Russia into which he was born and the ways in which he turned Russia toward Europe, the problems he faced and the sometimes inventive and sometimes incredibly brutal ways...
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What is it like when tens of thousands of refugees return home from several years of exile to rebuild their lives? In this program, Muslim refugees from the village of Stolac describe the challenges of living with their wartime enemies; Croat refugees, preparing to celebrate Easter, seek guidance from a clergy that is itself divided between a desire for reconciliation and a belief in racial supremacy; and Bosnia's major religious leaders in Sarajevo...
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From the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact to the launch of Operation Barbarossa, this program explores in detail the efforts of Hitler and Stalin to outwit each other during the so-called period of cooperation lasting from August 1939 to June 1941-and how their mutual distrust wrong-footed them both, with disastrous results for their countries. Numerous quotations from the dictators are included, as well as readings from the diaries of Joseph Goebbels,...
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The end of World War II brought a desolate European landscape with two countries and two ideologies in an epic face-off. Sir David Frost and noted historian Michael Beschloss examine a multitude of essential topics and events of the period, including the roots of the Cold War, the early challenge to Truman, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War and the spread of "red scare" paranoia, the arms race and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, Khrushchev, the...
10) Stalin: red god
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When atheistic Joseph Stalin assumed power, he put to use his training as a Russian Orthodox priest to redirect his people's devotional fervor and to cast himself as a secular god. Using eyewitness accounts, reenactments of key events in Stalin's life, and examples of Soviet film, art, music, and architecture, this provocative program demonstrates how Stalin ennobled communism and elevated it to the level of a state religion. Neo-Stalinists, nostalgic...
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Instigated in the name of the Russian people, the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II was actually guided by moderates and aristocrats. What parallels can be drawn between the February and October Revolutions, and in what ways did the two events differ? Did the Tsar's ouster set the stage for Lenin's rise to power, or was it an attempt to stem the tide of true radicalism? This program provides answers as it sifts through the political and cultural origins...
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This comprehensive ten-year history of Russia following glasnost and perestroika presents a dismal picture of a nation in disarray, battling with seemingly insurmountable economic, social, and political problems. Major topics include the election of Mikhail Gorbachev; dissolution of the gulag system; Boris Yeltsin's opposition to Gorbachev's initiatives; environmental legacies, including the disaster of Chernobyl; the break-away of the Baltic states;...
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During World War I, the Ottoman Empire exterminated more than one million members of its minority Armenian population. This program, narrated by Julianna Margulies, unflinchingly addresses the Armenian genocide, a dark and long-suppressed chapter in 20th-century history. Rarely seen footage, uncensored photographs, excerpts from eyewitness reports and newspaper articles, and interviews with leading experts, relatives of survivors and perpetrators,...
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Nationalism is not compatible with the progress of history, says Eric Hobsbawm. In this program, the renowned Marxist historian travels 35 miles on the Pressburg Railway to prove his point-a brief trip from Vienna to Bratislava in 1996 and a century-long journey through a landscape that has seen some of Europe's most turbulent political changes. Using the excursion as a paradigm for the nationalistic struggles of the region, Professor Hobsbawm traces...
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Behind the smokescreen of the massive Anglo-American/Soviet pincer movement that would inevitably crush the German war effort, Churchill and Stalin were locked in a grim struggle of wills to set the terms that would decide the immediate future of postwar Europe-a contest in which victory was tipped to the U.S.S.R. through the secret intervention of President Roosevelt. This program reveals the details, supported by readings from the diaries of Sir...
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This program documents the achievements of the Russian avant-garde movement and the impact of the Russian Revolution, which at first nurtured modern art as an emblem of communist culture and then banned it in favor of socialist realism. Set within the context of the life of the pivotal art critic Nikolai Punin, the key events of the Lenin/Stalin years and the contributions of major artists such as Malevich, Tatlin, and Filonov are described. Plentiful...
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In the midst of the trauma of the Vietnam War, a U.S. diplomatic strategy evolves that begins the unraveling of the Soviet Empire. This program on the Cold War of the 1970s and 80s, hosted by David Frost and featuring historian Michael Beschloss, focuses on such key events and tactics as detente, the manipulations that sparked Middle East tensions between Soviet-supported Egypt and American-backed Israel, Nixon's historic trip to China, the SALT talks,...
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In tsarist Russia, Nicholas II had absolute power over his vast realm, yet he was helpless in the face of his son Alexei's life-threatening hemophilia. Enter Rasputin, a self-styled holy man whose apparent ability to heal the young heir to the throne won him the devotion of Empress Alexandra, to the dismay of practically everyone else. This program presents the wrenching drama of the collapse of the centuries-old Romanov dynasty-a story of abdication,...
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Toward the end of World War II, as the era of European empires was coming to a close, a new world order was in the making-and Roosevelt and Stalin were at the center of its creation. This program tracks the political hopes and fears of the Allies during the period that ended with the death of FDR and the collapse of the Third Reich. The words of Roosevelt, Stalin, W. Averell Harriman, Daisy Suckley, Anthony Eden, and Lord Moran offer insights into...
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Alexander Solzhenitsy's 1970 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech is the text for this program, which exhorts viewers to shoulder their responsibilities as citizens to fight untruth, injustice, and repression wherever they arise and before they become too powerful to overcome. Never delivered because he was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union in time, the speech is read by Solzhenitsyn in Russian (in the English version by actor Tom Courtenay). Using...